It’s about context not content

The Havas Media Lab just put out a paper on user-generated context — a significant tweak of the new media mantra about user-generated content (meaning all those videos, blogs, and podcasts that the people formally known as the audience are now making for themselves). The authors argue that most of this new content is really [...]

Austin Eats

nota bene:  I’ve expanded this post with input from a friend
As a once and always-in-spirit denizen of Austin, Texas, I’m often asked where to eat there. Below is a list of what I just sent to my friend Jonathan Tasini who will be there next week for a bloggers’ meeting:
Comment with your ideas and [...]

Cole Campbell’s Ideas More Relevant Than Ever

Still on the subject of journalism and media… I just came across this commentary that I missed when it came out a year ago, written by Cole’s colleague and a friend of mine, David Ryfe.
The vision articulated by the late journalist and educator has provoked substantial criticism. But his insistence on bringing the public [...]

The Citizen of Citizen Media

An interesting discussion has taken place today about citizen media. The discussion started on Twitter (so that’s what it’s good for!) and moved on to a few blogs: One was on Jay Rosen’s Press Think, where he hazarded a definition of citizen journalism:
When the people formerly known as the audience employ the [...]

Wedding Crashers

Tomdispatch reports that since 2001 the US has bombed at least four wedding parties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tom Engelhardt’s piece starts with a snapshot of the Jenna Bush’s daugter’s wedding then cuts to this:
That was early May of this year. Less than two months later, halfway across the world, another tribal affair was underway. [...]

Tweeterland and Thinking

I have been dragged, kicking and screaming, in to Tweeterland, the twitter.com site that gives one an entire 140 characters to make any given statement. It was bad enough starting to blog where the attention span rarely runs over two paragraphs. It got worse with Facebook with the short updates allowed to friends. [...]

Deliberative Democracy Exchange

I’ve just come off of an amazing three-day meeting convened by the Kettering Foundation: the Deliberative Democracy Exchange.  There were about two hundred participants from all over the world coming together to exchange thoughts and think through little-d democratic politics, a politics that’s about deliberation, engagement, and civic agency.  I like to describe democracy as [...]

Political Poetry

I just spent a very nice lunch hour at the Center for American Progress listening to “political poets” read and discuss their work. As the promo for the event read,
Percy Shelley said that poetry, also known as critical reflections upon popular culture, was a touchstone and an influencing agent for understanding and advocating for current [...]

V.P. Qualities

I was up late with some friends last night engaging in the usual political banter and the question of the moment: who will — or rather who should — Obama pick to be his vice presidential running mate? What should be the criteria? After much deliberation, it seemed to us that the usual [...]

Beyond Broadcast: is this public media?

I’m at the Beyond Broadcast conference in Washington, DC, convened by American University’s Center for Social Media. It’s good to see a lot of old and new friends and the continuation of some projects I worked on when I was at the Center for Social Media. The question on the table is how new kinds [...]